Marxist Literary Group summer 2011 Institute on Culture and Society
Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago

June 20, 2011

Marxism and the bourgeois revolution

Spencer Leonard, "Marx's critique of political economy: Proletarian socialism continuing the bourgeois revolution?"
Pamela Nogales, "Marx on the U.S. Civil War as the 2nd American Revolution"
Jeremy Cohan, "Lukacs on Marx's Hegelianism and the dialectic of Marxism"
Moderator: Chris Cutrone

The "bourgeois revolutions" from the 16th through the 19th centuries -- extending into the 20th -- conformed humanity to modern city life, ending traditional, pastoral, religious custom in favor of social relations of the exchange of labor. Abbe Sieyes wrote in 1789 that, in contradistinction to the clerical 1st Estate who "prayed" and the aristocratic 2nd Estate who "fought," the commoner 3rd Estate "worked:" "What has the 3rd Estate been? Nothing." "What is it? Everything." Kant warned that universal bourgeois society would be the mere midpoint in humanity's achievement of freedom. After the last bourgeois revolutions in Europe of 1848 failed, Marx wrote of the "constitution of capital," the ambivalent, indeed self-contradictory character of "free wage labor." In the late 20th century, the majority of humanity abandoned agriculture in favor of urban life -- however in "slum cities." How does the bourgeois revolution appear from a Marxian point of view? How did what Marx called the "proletarianization" of society circa 1848 signal not only the crisis and supersession, but the need to fulfill and "complete" the bourgeois revolution, whose task now fell to the politics of "proletarian" socialism, expressed by the workers' call for "social democracy?" How did this express the attempt, as Lenin put it, to overcome bourgeois society "on the basis of capitalism" itself? How did subsequent Marxism lose sight of Marx on this, and how might Marx's perspective on the crisis of the bourgeois revolution in the 19th century still resonate today?

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